GET LAMP and Interactive Fiction

This weblog went down due to a long-forgotten DNS change, and the main website was doing fine, so it went dormant for a couple years.

While there’s not been a lot of eventful items in the years since the last entry, it’s probably worth throwing out a few items of note.

First, as of this writing, the documentary continues to sell copies (a few a week) after the initial release of 2010. So 5 years! Not bad at all. At this point, I’d estimate there are about 250 physical copies left, after which I am not reprinting them (the documentary is likely to go fully digital-only at that point). So if you want the pretty packaging, then definitely stop by the site and get a copy.

One of the figures in the movie, Andrew Plotkin, had a kickstarter to go full-time interactive-fiction writing, and he got it, and he did! And a few years later (these things do take years), he released Hadean Lands, a fully-realized modern interactive fiction project, which is for sale, and which brought with it all sorts of technical innovations he worked on. Bravo!

I occasionally check in with other interviewees from the movie – they’ve all been doing well, as far as I know. Steve Meretzky moved to California, Nick Montfort released a lot of fun computer poetry, and footage from GET LAMP was used for an awards ceremony recognizing Mark Blank, Dave Lebling, and the rest of the contributors to Zork. (Nobody asked me, but that’s what Creative Commons is for – and honestly, I’m proud as hell it was used that way.)

The GET LAMP footage has been used extensively by The Digital Antiquarian, who has been doing brilliant, brilliant posts for years now based off those interviews and tons of other research. Until a couple other possible Infocom-related books come out (one’s been at it for 7 years), this is your best way to really get the amazing overview of the 1980s software world from both a business and creator standpoint.

I’ve made another documentary and am working on three more, and I work for the Internet Archive in San Francisco, and… well, look, just go visit my main weblog ASCII if you want that information.

And as for the picture above – I finally got the artwork for the packaging framed! This is the original, by Lukas Ketner, before he did a few digital manipulations for the final work. I’m glad it’s finally going up on my wall. What a great piece of work.